Forty days ago, I started posting on my blog again after having deleted the whole thing years ago. This was my Lenten sacrifice, because my inclination at this point in time is not to make public statements. A few people read the blog, and if they got anything out of it that is good. What I got out of it was a better picture of my own life and search for truth, so that is good too. I’m just writing this post from the heart to wrap up the forty days.

I was always a weirdo, probably due to high IQ. I was in the gifted class in elementary school, but I was even an outcast among those folks. However, it wasn’t until my brother was murdered when I was twelve years old in 1983 that I began to realize the extent to which the world at large was insane. This led to me being even more on the outskirts of society and linking up with other weird kids in high school. Also my observation that establishment Justice was a joke in my brother’s murder case made me more easily influenced by the leftist propaganda of my teachers, my friend who was raised by hippies, and later my professors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

It was in Ann Arbor that I firmly rejected mainstream society. I worked for Greenpeace for about two weeks, until I saw that they had sold out as well. A few trips to the wealthy neighborhoods of Grosse Pointe to try to sell fake environmental concern to outrageously wealthy people was enough for me. It was the lady with the huge mansion and giant boat in her yard who honestly told me that she was up to her eyeballs in debt because of their fancy house and fancy yacht and couldn’t afford to give any money to Greenpeace, that finally got me to quit. She said she honestly would want to donate, but she had too many loan payments to be able to do so. I believed her.

I started to spend a lot of my time walking out of Ann Arbor to various parks to try to get to a place where I couldn’t hear the noise of the city. I had never lived in a city before. The only place where I could get away from the noise was sitting by the banks of the rushing Huron River, where the sound of the water drowned out the sound of the city. I knew that when I turned 21 I was getting a modest settlement from the insurance company of the people who sold beer to the underage attendees of the teenage drinking party that resulted in my brother’s murder. So I decided I would buy land with the money and move toward self-sufficiency, leaving society completely behind. For this reason, I moved to Missoula, Montana in 1990, stopping at a Rainbow Gathering in northern Minnesota on the way.

In Missoula, I got involved with the local Earth First! Group. At the time, the Earth First! Newspaper was headquartered in Missoula, so there was a lot of activity in the area. I also attended classes at the University of Montana. When the first Gulf War started in January 1991, I was involved in many anti-war protests. A government agent tried to entice me to join him to stage a sit-in to shut down the local bank, but I declined. I joined the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. I rode my bike to their annual meeting. I was dismayed to see the parking lot full of SUV’s. They were protesting drilling in the Badger Two Medicine area of the National Forest. I stood up at the meeting and suggested they could start by not driving SUVs. Dead silence. I didn’t fit in with that group either.

Missoula was surrounded by beautiful national forests, but suffered from horrible air pollution in the winter. Sulfur dioxide filled the air when inversions kept the warm air in the valley. Stage 1 air alerts meant that it was recommended that everyone stay indoors. I had come there to get back to nature not to be poisoned by heavy industry, so it was clear I couldn’t stay in the city. I looked at buying some land around there. I rode my bike all around the western side of the state. Once I rode my bike by myself from Missoula to Glacier National Park. I crossed the continental divide on my bicycle. A train was chugging up the tracks at the same time I was crossing. The engineer tooted his whistle and waved at me. He understood the effort of climbing the Continental Divide by pedal power. Going down the other side was really fun, down, down, down for many, many minutes.

I looked at land in Northern California as well, but got scared away by being bit by a rabid fox. I went along with the rabies injections and returned to Missoula to finish the series, so that I didn’t have to camp in my tent anymore.

Somehow I got the idea of looking for land in the Ozark mountains instead. I think it was because of the low property taxes. I went there on a Greyhound with my bicycle and a couple of suitcases. That adventure turned into a disaster and I went back to Michigan.

That was in 1992. Bill Clinton had just been elected. Because I was moving from Arkansas to Michigan, I didn’t get to vote at all. But I remember listening to Clinton’s inaugural speech from my bedroom at my parents’ house in Michigan. I actually believed him. I thought he was going to do great things. Lies, all lies, of course.

I got married. I had a child. We were still into planting our own food, etc., although my original goal of buying land got sidetracked. I decided to finish my teaching degree instead. Somewhere along the line there I must have gone back to thinking participating in regular society was worthwhile, but that didn’t last long. I wrote in an earlier post about why my husband and I moved to an “intentional community” in Arizona and got horribly duped. My first husband (the marriage was annulled, so I am not sure what to call him) is still in that cult, being led astray by a charlatan.

Back in Michigan in 2000, I was a single mom. I finally took the last few university classes, got my degree, and got a full time teaching job at the Muslim school. Many lessons were learned there about how much most Muslim Americans hate America.

Then 9/11/01 happened, and I was totally duped. I turned into a NeoCon. What an idiot I was.

I finally got some sense back in 2011, which I wrote about in my post about 911 Truth. Ten years of being a brain dead NeoCon zombie. Shoot. Well, at least I know where those people are coming from now.

I have pretty much come full circle. If only I had spent all of that time prepping for self-sufficiency like I originally intended. I started to think that there was little point in just surviving if the whole society has gone out the window. Now I think there is some point to that, if you can make it through to the other side when people are actually willing to face the truth and rebuild something new. So that is what I am doing now, I suppose. I will buckle down and start from where I am. I have learned many lessons in all of those side adventures, so hopefully they will be of some use. I might post more blogs in the future if something really needs to be said. For now, it’s time to plant some more rows of peas.